Thought Leadership

Programmatic Industry Predictions for 2020

July 11, 2019

By Rubicon Project

At this year’s Interact Warsaw, IAB Europe sat down with James Brown, Rubicon Project’s Managing Director of EMEA, to discuss some of his programmatic industry predictions we may see come to fruition in 2020. Check out the video below.

What are your industry predictions for 2020?

I think it’s going to continue to be quite tough. It doesn’t really matter which market you operate in around the world. We know that everywhere there is economic and political uncertainty, so that doesn’t create… the first thing that is impacted with uncertainty is typically the advertising market.

So, I don’t think that bodes particularly well in 2020 for us. Having said that, I think within the ad tech ecosystem there will be, a lot of the complexity that we talked to as it relates to header bidding and the supply chain, I think we’ll see a lot more clarity in that. I think there will be less steps between the advertiser’s dollar ending up in the publishers pockets.

I think there’ll be a bit of a collapsing of the supply chain. I think we will see growth in things like Rubicon Project, we will see growth in open source header bidding solutions that will help drive that kind of clarity, if you will, within the supply chain.

But overall, I think trading conditions will be quite challenging. But I think increasingly we’ll see more buyers focusing their demand on the most efficient and high quality paths to supply.

So for us at Rubicon Project, being the cleanest, most well-lit, most efficient path for advertisers to reach our publisher audiences, is a key area for us for driving growth.